The Mind on Fire

Provocateur (Art)

I love the beauty and majesty created by a talented visual artist. I do some sketching, but my true ability to create art comes in the form of words rather than paint and canvas.

I’ve been blessed to find some of the most talented new artists in the world through the web.Many of these wonderful artists have been gracious enough to let me use their work to enhance the mood or illustration for my writings. This page is dedicated to those artists and their work.Please take the time to visit their sites and encourage their efforts! (They are listed below in no specific order.)

Jindra Noewi:

Jindra says in her About section:

I am the artist known as NOEWI. I am originally from the Czech Republic. I now reside in the United States and would like to share with you my passion for the arts and culture of life itself.

It is an amazing world and we all experience different journeys through our personal adventures that form the person that we become.

A wise girl kisses but doesn’t love, listens but doesn’t believe, and leaves before she is left. ~~Marilyn Monroe

(Below: Blue Ballet by Ryan Swallow)

Ryan Swallow:

“Ryan Swallow,a self-taught painter who currently resides in Arizona, has produced more than 100 paintings in his 18 years as a professional painter.” His work is filled with hauntingly beautiful images. Ryan creates very unique work in a world filled with too much sameness and conformity.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~Anais Nin

Svetlana Novikova:

Svetlana Novikova is originally from Moscow, but now makes her home in Texas. She explains in her About page:

I was born and raised in Moscow area of Russia. I’ve studied at Classical art school

as a child and a teenager in Russia. I came to the US in 1992 to pursue education. After I graduated from the University of Maine, I met my husband, and eventually we moved to Austin, TX, where we now we raise our son.

I’ve been painting professionally for over 12 years. I enjoy painting all subjects. M

Since this is my website I thought it a good idea to tell you a little bit about myself. How do you fit a lifetime of work into a few paragraphs. I can’t do it. The first thing I will tell you – I do not talk in third person. That said; you either have to suffer through my narrative or go look at the pictures. Me, I would go look at the pictures.

I sold my first painting in 1969, oil on canvas a surreal apocalyptic thing it was. We

ll that is not true is it, I traded the painting to a musician who is now a household name for a 1959 Strat. Better than cash I thought at the time, until the rent was due … but that is what rent parties were for.

So here I stand decades later (rent parties are a fond and distant memory) still making my living as an artist. With over twelve hundred exhibits behind me, a hand full of books, countless artist statements. and way too many interviews.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Leonid Afremov:

Leonid creates painted work that tricks the senses, creating tactile sensations and the sense of control loss – one feels they are sliding into the lovely pieces by Leonid. From his About page:

Leonid Afremov (born 12 July 1955 in Vitebsk, Belarus) is a Russian–Israeli modern impressionistic artist who works mainly with a palette knife and oils.[1] He developed his own unique technique and style which is unmistakable and cannot be confused with other artists. Afremov is mainly known as being a self-representing artist who promotes and sells his work exclusively over the internet with very little exhibitions and involvement of dealers and galleries.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.~John Keats

Richard Young:

Wonderful, passionate images and moments caught in the artwork of Richard Young.

Richard introduces himself on his website:

Welcome to theR Young Artwebsite, an online art gallery featuring the original, fine art oil paintings, sketches, drawings and pastel artwork. The style of my artwork is modern, yet classical / traditional and occasionally contemporary. The composition and technique I use is influenced and inspired by the realism and romanticism of my favourite post renaissance classical Masters and their wonderful, timeless masterpieces. Especially Bouguereau, as his artwork was full of beauty and passion…

Predominantly figurative and of females, the tendency of my artwork is towards carefully composed anonymity, capturing the emotions and self belief of the subject, rather than characteristic individual representation. The creation of figurative artwork not only depicts the emotions of the artist, it transforms the artist’s emotions. Also, it is far easier for all of us to carefully scrutinize figurative artwork and judge its anatomical accuracy, often creating a more personal understanding of specific favourite pieces. Myfigurative artwork is full of passion and is occasionally sensual.

Pablo Picasso

Marissa 2017

Yoda

“Do or do not. There is no try.” — Yoda

Sidney Sheldon

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Marissa 2016

C D Bowen

“Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.” ~~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

As The Poems Go by Charles Bukowski

as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.

Pages

L C Powell

“The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say.
That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.”
~~ Lawrence Clark Powell

Goodreads

S Gabrielle

“Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer.
But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”
~~ Sidonie Gabrielle

Alone by Edgar Allan Poe

Alone by Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.